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April 29, 2011

More Multifunctional Grips

Multifunctional grips first showed up (in very basic form) for hatches in AutoCAD LT 2010. They were improved in AutoCAD LT 2011 and extended to polylines, and now they’ve gone even farther in AutoCAD LT 2012.

I already showed you one example in the UCS icon post, but you’ll also find multifunctional grips on lines, arcs, elliptical arcs, dimensions, and multileaders. For some objects, you’ll see different options depending on which grip you hover over.

Before we start our tour of the new grips, here’s a refresher on how they work.

Hovering over an eligible grip brings up the multifunctional menu.

You can use the arrow keys or the mouse to pick an item from the list.

If you just left-click on the grip instead, you can use Ctrl to cycle through the available modes.

You can also use the space bar after left-clicking to cycle through the standard grip-editing modes of Move, Copy, Rotate, Scale, and Mirror.

And if you make it all the way back to Stretch (after Mirror), you can use Ctrl again to access the multifunctional behavior.

Now, here’s where you’ll find the new grips.

Lines

The middle grip is not multifunctional.

Arcs

Notice that the old “double-grips” with both an arrow and a square are gone. That’s because you can access both functions from the multifunctional grip. The center grip is not multifunctional.

Elliptical Arcs

These grips are a little funny. The only time you’ll actually see a multifunctional menu is if your elliptical arc ends at a quadrant – 0, 90, 270, or 360 degrees. Then, you can either stretch the axis or lengthen the arc.

Otherwise, the end grip will be a non-multifunctional arrow that will lengthen the arc, like you see on the left end of the arc above, and the quadrant grips will just show the lengths of the axes. If you left click on a quadrant grip, you can change the axis length either with the mouse or by entering a new distance.

Dimensions

For dimensions, some of the options that were previously in the right-click shortcut menu are now in multifunctional grips.

Multileaders

A couple things to note here. “Lengthen Landing” leave the text where it is, unlike the arrow grip which shifts the note. Also, “Add Vertex” lets you specify a new location for the arrowhead, adding a segment between it and the existing grip. This is different from polylines, where new vertices are added between existing ones.